It seems like the European Day of Languages was only yesterday and yet here we are, with our undergraduate teaching just having finished and our students and staff involved in oral assessments and final pieces of coursework. Many of our Year 3 students are getting themselves ready for a semester on Study Abroad in the spring and, for everyone else, it’ll be back to Stirling where we’ve got new modules launching and lots of exciting outreach work being undertaken by our Language Ambassadors.
There’s plenty to update you on and we’ll hopefully get a few blog posts up over the coming days. However, one thing we’ve been particularly pleased about this semester is that we’ve seen the return of former students who have decided to come back to Stirling, in one guise or another, and whose experiences give a great sense of the range of routes that studying a language opens up.
To start off the updates, we were really glad to hear from Erin, who graduated in June with a BA Hons in French and, in September, started our MSc programme in International Conflict and Cooperation, building on the dissertation she wrote on Islamophobia in contemporary French society: “In the beginning it was quite daunting and just a lot of work, almost everyone else came from a politics background and I was having a bit of an identity crisis thinking ‘well, I can speak another language’. After a couple of weeks, I relaxed into being an International Relations student and managed to impress one of my tutors by being able to speak French in order to analyse a speech by President Macron (that we happened to have studied in our French classes…). Despite the mountain of readings I am buried under now, I am enjoying myself.
As part of this Masters I have signed up to go on a study trip to Geneva in May 2024, the aim of which is to secure work opportunities and connections in UN organisations in Switzerland. I have already volunteered to act as translator for the class because I’m the only francophone in our class. Hopefully, it will provide an opportunity to practice my French – I have been reassured by Brigitte that the Swiss sometimes speak slower, which is a relief since I haven’t been able to practice all that much since graduation.
While it is sometimes strange to be back at Stirling in a new department, and not see the faces I became used to, it is nice to catch up every once in a while with the members of the French department in the corridors of Cottrell building which I am convinced is a maze. This is my fifth year here and I still get lost!”
We’re delighted to see Erin back on campus and grateful that she made the time to send us through this update. We’ll look forward to hearing how the Geneva trip goes in the spring, too. More news about other Stirling returnees, and other assorted updates, to follow…
French at Stirling 